Branches of a House

<p><span style=color: rgba(26 26 26 1)>From a Conradian vantage point on the banks of the Thames to Lodz's Piotrkowska Ulicia the longest street in Europe Agnieszka Studzi?ska calibrates her seeing on history's ruins making their way into the private intimacies of home and the unhomely. The architecture of fragments-of bones of the conversations with grandmothers husbands children and the overheard violences of strangers-takes up Blanchot's call to unwork silence to arrive at a new language. Stunningly deft and formally alive these poems at every turn metamorphose a self to deliver unforgettably on that very promise of newness. </span><em>-Sandeep Parmar</em></p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The measurements of existing from the inside given through the concentrated elegant details of the outside -this is a book of memory of record of heightened perception in poetry. It's a remarkable measured generous collection driven by an awareness and insight that reaches past the language of the outer world into a confrontation with something permanent and transitory. In this paradox is the brilliance. <em>-SJ Fowler</em></p><p> </p><p><br></p><p>Agnieszka Studzi?ska's <em>Branches of a House</em> is a poetic exploration of dwelling that becomes a hauntology of lost family lost country lost language. Its mitochondrial tracing of generations - grandparents parents children - evokes the traumatic shadow of the past: not just an émigré's return to the familiar Polish landscape of 'wetlands and fields' and silver birches; but also the sense of 'ghost houses in every village' - the product of war holocaust diaspora and the passage of time. The ghosts shadows and absences are counter-balanced by an embodied poetics tracking the body in time and through time - as child woman lover wife mother - with an attention to colours tastes smells atmospheres silences. The making and unmaking of home in a poetry of continuing formal inventiveness and considerable emotional and linguistic delicacy also involves a reaching out to other 'unfinished separations' and 'migratory configurations' historical and contemporary in this impressively sustained sequence of poems.  -<em>Robert Hampson </em></p>